Itineration += JSON + JS + HTML5/CSS3

04 February 2013

Fun News!

I’m excited to announce that I will be helping Cynthia Bateman and Gerald Jackson build a ground-up, new website to tentatively launch by Sept. 1st 2013!

I am currently serving as an Associate Editor, and what attracted me to Itineration was its vision to “itinerate” the disciplinary lines with rhetoric as its guide. With that in mind, we are striving to include digital texts from a variety of sources, such as game studies, the visual and programming arts, and other varieties of multimodal texts that help curate discussion of rhetoric and techne in numerous spheres of thought and practice.

Yet, with this vision and goal, there also comes issues of how to organize such a wide variety of content that also makes it accessible to both rhetoricians and others alike. The key will be to practice good prior design that is scalable and modular, and currently the site is using Wordpress.

To account for the inclusion of various types of content, I am planning on building my skills with data structures, using JSON as a means to construct a readable and well-organized backend. From there, with some basic javascript, coupled with HTML5/CSS3, we will be able to re-elaborate the content in a variety of ways.

Cynthia has noted that she would like the journal to become a kind-of topoi-tool; where readers can itinerate through the journal’s content and use it as a site for rhetorical invention. How brilliant is this?! This is what OA journals should be. Online journals should also devise ways to filter and render content in such inventive ways.

I can envision a space on the site that uses the tag information to help users filter through metacontent, finding ideas and texts that help them to generate new ideas or make their own even stronger! I wonder if there’s a way to revise the tagsExplorer program to launch as a means to filter through Itinerations content, pulling up nodes of semantic information based on its image, title, tags, and short description?

Some things to ponder and look into…

All this to say, my summer just filled up with a great and worthwhile project! :-)